The Games We Play
by colourwhirled
Summary: The greatest lies are the ones we tell ourselves. And when Toph is asked a difficult question, she struggles to find an easy answer.
**A/N:** Written for Season 3 of the 2016 Pro-Bending Circuit.

 **Team:** Makapu Moose Lions

 **Waterbender:** Write a story about someone trying to decide between three choices

 **Prompts:** Red (easy), Opal (medium), quote: "Three things cannot be hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth" (hard)

 **Word Count:** 1106 words (excludes author's notes)

 **Disclaimer:** ATLA/LOK are property of Bryke forevermore, all characters and settings mentioned herein belong to them.

x

 **The Games We Play**

 _"So here's something I've always been curious about. Who's Lin's dad?"_

It is entirely her own fault, Toph muses. Though she is taken aback at the young lavabender's impertinence, her fingers remain calm and steady, the chopsticks in them still dangling a long, wiggly piece of noodle that drips over her paper cup.

The tension around the campfire has spiked through the metaphorical roof. She _hears_ Lin's furious glare, as heated as the red flames warming the teapot. Opal shifts uncomfortably where she sits, perhaps biting back a word of reprimand for her bumbling buffoon of a companion.

Toph knows what she would have done, had she been younger. Way back when, she would have stomped an iron foot into the ground and silenced the boy with a well-aimed boulder to the head, well before the question had fully escaped his fool mouth. Instead, young Bolin (that was his name, right?) eases from the most infinitesimal of flinches when he realizes that his question has not earned himself a mouthful of dirt.

How soft she's become in her old age. Katara, bless her tender heart, would have keeled over in laughter if she could see her old friend now.

 _What would Katara do?_ Toph asks herself suddenly. _How would Katara answer?_

Because for all that her oldest friend is gentle and wise, she is not without guile. Toph recalls, absurdly (for this is neither the time nor place for such reminiscences), a day when she and Katara had marched into a Fire Nation village, dressed in red linens, prepared to pull off the biggest heist of their rebellious young lives…and had instead escaped by the skin of their teeth, thanks to the waterbender's resourcefulness.

 _That_ Katara would not disapprove of Toph's silence, she is fairly certain. That Katara had stolen from pirates, overturned Fire Navy ships, and even mastered bloodbending to achieve her ends.

But the other Katara, the one who had dutifully washed their clothes and cooked their meals and led them by the hand out of the Si Wong desert, Toph can hear her maternal reprimand right now.

 _How_ could _you keep it from her, Toph? How could you keep it from_ us? _What about_ him _, does he_ know _? How could you not tell him?_

In her mind's eye, she is young and beautiful once more, dressed in silk robes, with her hair piled ornately on top of her head, and her cheeks rouged the same hue of her painted-red lips. The night air is humid and it is stifling inside the Earth King's palace.

Making her way toward the balcony, she is able to discern _him_ , standing alongside the remainder of the delegation from the Southern Water Tribe.

She senses his heartbeat skyrocket as she walks past and his palms go sweaty. He's laughing loudly at a joke someone's cracked, but to her ears, there's a definite layer of artifice over it.

A busboy approaches her with a tray of champagne flutes. She holds her hand up and declines politely.

"Not drinking tonight?"

There is something in Katara's voice that smacks of a challenge.

"Nope."

"That's…" and now Katara struggles, because even though she's confrontational, she isn't _cruel_ , and even though she suspects, she doesn't _know_ , "…very unlike you, Toph."

 _That's because I haven't been myself for a while, now_ , Toph wants to say.

Instead, she shrugs.

Katara falls silent for a while, but Toph doesn't let her guard down. She can feel the weight of the waterbender's shrewd blue gaze on her.

Finally, Katara drains the deep red liquid from her glass, sets it down on the stone fence, and takes a deep breath.

"Is it his?" she asks directly.

Toph's head snaps up in shock and for once, she is glad that she can't see the expression on Katara's face now.

"Does he know?" she presses softly.

There is no judgment in her voice, none whatsoever. There is only sympathy, and concern, and kindness. And sadness, just a trace of sadness.

It's a nice idea, Toph will later think to herself, one not _entirely_ rooted in fantasy. But the truth, the real truth, is that she doesn't know. She's been irresponsible and altogether too adventurous, and now she must bring this child – _her_ child – into this world without a father. Not that there would be any lack of takers, if she asked.

"No," Toph answers at last. Her voice is faint and she does not specify which of Katara's questions she has just answered.

For what it's worth, she _thinks_ it could be his. It is certainly not outside the realm of possibility. But that's not enough to saddle him with this, not enough to put such a burden on him. He's a good man, he is, but his heart belongs to his work and his people, and she has no intention of dropping her comfortable life in Gaoling to go raise a child with him in some frozen nowhere.

"They say," Katara says eventually, in the same intolerably kind voice, "that three things cannot be hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth."

Toph lets out a snort at Katara's proffered wisdom. When she had been twelve years old, the moon spirit had been killed and the sun had been eclipsed in plain sight, so who was to say a small thing like the _truth_ was beyond reckoning?

"Whatever you say, Sugar Queen."

The sound of Katara's footsteps receding intermingle with the crackling of the flames before her, jarring her back to her present predicament.

To lie? To tell the truth? To say nothing at all?

What did that make her?

Well, a horrible mother for starters, but she's always known that. There's no fixing things with Lin by now. With parents like her own for role models, did she ever really stand a chance?

And then, an embarrassment for her granddaughter. Young Opal, who even now, sits so silently in her airbending uniform, no doubt dyed in red and orange and saffron. _Her_ granddaughter, an airbender. Who'd learned from the new Avatar. There are shades of Aang in her, little bits of Twinkletoes there. How would she react, knowing what her grandmother got up to, in order to bring her two daughters into the world?

And _Bolin_ …

She struggles, before remembering that she doesn't even know the guy, let alone care about his opinion of her. She dismisses the thought from her mind instead.

 _Sorry Katara_ , she thinks wryly, before at last she opens her mouth.

"He was a guy named Kanto," she breaks the silence with a shrug. "Nice man, but it didn't really work out between us."


End file.
